“To win you forever and tie you to myself, that is now my only goal in life,” he told Alma; and if only she got her divorce, he would no longer be plagued by the constant fear of losing the love of his life. “Alma, I implore you,” he insisted, “help me during these coming years! Do not leave me for a minute!” He promised her he would work hard and earn so much money that she would never lack for anything. After finishing Mirror Man, he would write “one book after another” in order to be more useful to Alma. He did not think that his father would have too many objections to their marriage. While the two never talked “about anything personal,” he nevertheless felt that Rudolf Werfel was “well content with my love for you.”
At the end of January 1920 Werfel returned to snow-covered Breitenstein, alone. “In the city I’m no longer able to pick up a pen,” he wrote in his diary, “not even for a letter.”[281] He pushed the first draft of Mirror Man to a conclusion. It was a piece, he wrote to Alma, who had stayed behind in Vienna, in which he felt he had combined “straight” theater with elements of farce, opera, and ballet. It was also his most vicious attack on Karl Kraus to date: he let his Mephistophelian Mirror Man slip into the role of the publisher of Die Fackel and wrote lines for him that were those of a self-important, fraudulent “East European backwoods lawyer” who inflated “any local gossip into a cosmic occurrence” — all this in a provocatively offensive musical number with a strong tinge of Jewish self-loathing. It ended with the words: “In short, because I... can’t... look people in the eye, I’ll look up their asses to see how good their ethics are.”
Haus Mahler, Alma Mahler’s villa in Breitenstein
After completing the first draft of the play, Werfel wrote to Kurt Wolff that the Magical Trilogy confirmed him in his conviction that none of his contemporaries had as much “theater blood” in their veins as he. He would soon travel to Munich (the new location of the publishing house) and read the “monster” to Wolff in several sessions. His friend Ernst Polak, to whom Werfel read isolated scenes from the play during a brief visit to Vienna, in his room in the Hotel Bristol, told Werfel that the work was superior even to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.[282] Fired by such encouragement, Werfel finished the second draft in the spring of 1920, in Breitenstein, paying particular attention to Alma’s suggestions for changes and improvements. She had, in fact, made deletions in her own hand in the original manuscript: at first, Werfel thought this an incomprehensible act of “irreverence,”[283] but now he cut and revised as much as possible while adding a few newly invented scenes. He told Alma that rewriting only produced “lame things.” “I am someone who gets it right the first time or not at all. Unfortunately!”
At this time Alma Mahler was back in Germany, visiting Walter Gropius. Once again she received daily letters from Werfel, documenting his longing, which seemed almost unbearable to him, and his panic that his beloved would withdraw from him or perhaps even leave him altogether. These visions were not entirely unfounded[284]: in her latest letters to her husband, Alma had emphasized that she no longer wanted a divorce but, on the contrary, was definitely planning to return to him. Werfel’s nerves were so frazzled that he developed insomnia and often woke up in the middle of the night, picked up a pistol, and searched the house from top to bottom for burglars.
In mid-March 1920 right-wing radicals attempted a coup d’état in Berlin. The uprising, led by Wolfgang Kapp (whose men wore the Indian swastika symbol on their steel helmets), was put down by the Socialist government in only a few days, but during this time a general strike paralyzed the whole country. As postal and telephone communications were severed, Werfel trembled for Alma’s and Manon’s safety, and a week passed after the Kapp Putsch before he heard anything from Weimar.
In the meantime Alma and her daughter had moved into Walter Gropius’s new apartment in Weimar. “You belong to me,” Werfel cried out to her in a letter. “Even spiritually! Don’t let them belittle the Jewish spirit!... My life! I am in such pain, to know you there!”
A few days before he had finished the second draft of Mirror Man, he received a telegram from the director of the Deutsche Theater in Berlin: Max Reinhardt invited him[285] to read from his new play in a series of events titled “Young Germany.” This invitation was the crowning glory of Werfel’s most productive year so far: he would be able to read from the Magical Trilogy on one of the most prestigious stages in the German-speaking world.
In the thirteen-month period since Werfel’s move to Breitenstein, he had produced — in addition to Mirror Man — the Murderer novella that was now doing well in the bookstores, The Black Mass, and numerous short stories, fairy tales, and essays. The love of his life had indeed liberated him from the Viennese “atmosphere of corruption” and transplanted him into monkish isolation: she had also succeeded in encouraging him to work on a daily and regular basis.
In the middle of April he recited long passages from his play at the Deutsche Theater. Max Reinhardt liked the Magical Trilogy and offered to produce it the following fall — on condition that Werfel cut the play considerably and revise it once more, as its present long chain of dreams and fairy-tale episodes was far too long for an evening at the theater.
After those painful weeks of separation, Werfel met Alma again in Berlin. To Walter Gropius’s dismay[286], his wife now appeared in public with her lover in Germany — in his country, his own backyard... Unabashed, she visited the cafés and theaters of the Reich’s capital in Werfel’s company and also came along to his conferences and private discussions with Max Reinhardt. They then traveled to Munich together, where Werfel delivered his play to Kurt Wolff in person. He had not, however, paid any attention to Reinhardt’s suggestions for changes in the text.
At the beginning of May 1920[287], Alma Mahler left her lover once again; she had been invited to a Gustav Mahler festival in Amsterdam. She sent Franz back to Breitenstein, back to his desk in the large wood-paneled studio of her country house.
By way of Gloggnitz and Schottwien and through the Adlitz valleys, I drive in the direction of Kreuzberg, following the signs to Speckbacherhütte. Behind the small railway station in Breitenstein, a steep road winds uphill; after a kilometer or so I reach the turnoff, a narrow road lined with flowering fruit trees. The three-story Haus Mahler has been visibly altered by renovations and additions made in the course of past decades; from the outside, one can only guess at its original form. At the end of World War II, Red Army soldiers were stationed in the building. After the Allied forces withdrew from Austria, the house was acquired by a shipyard in Korneuburg and has since been used as a vacation home for employees of that company.
The first guests of the year will be arriving the coming week, during the Easter holidays. The K.’s, the caretaker family, are busy sprucing the place up for them. Herr K. shows me the large, white-tiled kitchen: it does not seem to have changed much at all, this former domain of Agnes Hvizd, the cook. Her pleasant little room was right above the kitchen, and a wrought-iron spiral staircase still leads to the upper floor. I make my way through a dark corridor to a roofed veranda: in Alma Mahler’s day, this was a large wooden deck lined with tall pillars where she received her guests, who could relax in deck chairs and rattan seats around a cozy coffee table. Now it is the dining room of the shipyard workers’ recreation home — an addition of glass and concrete furnished with Formica tables and plastic chairs on a linoleum floor.
“And this used to be the fireplace room,” says the caretaker. We are standing in a bare room. The paneled walls have been covered over with yellow-gray wallpaper, even where the open fireplace used to be. “Yes, the fireplace,” Herr K. says, “it was bricked up.” He tells me that a shipyard executive found Oskar Kokoschka’s fire fresco above the mantel morally offensive and had it destroyed. As soon as that had been done, the fireplace was bricked up. Now that space is taken up by a color photograph of Kurt Waldheim, president of Austria, and next to it stands a plastic sign showing the varieties of ice-cream bars available here. Fairly dra
stic changes, in a spot where, among many others, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler, Gerhart Hauptmann and Carl Zuckmayer, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Hans Pfitzner, and Ernst Křenek came to visit Alma, to talk to her and to trade jokes and arguments with Werfel — or simply came to Breitenstein for rest and inspiration at Haus Mahler.
Pumuckl’s Journey to Master Eder is the title of a fairy-tale record that Barbara, the caretakers’ nine-year-old daughter, has put on a portable record player, the volume turned up as far as it will go, here in the fireplace room. Barbara sings along, takes a few tentative dance steps, and then bites into a chunk of bacon and a stale, dry roll.
On my way upstairs I scan the shelves of the home’s library: Julia, Sylvia, and doctor novels, Westerns and “Jerry Cotton” books. “This is room number five,” says Frau K., opening the door to a room filled with bunk beds. Here, too, the handsome paneled walls have been papered over, as they have been in rooms three and seven. Bunk beds and faded wallpaper everywhere. In Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel’s former bathroom, three long-necked shower heads hover above a bare stone floor: it looks like the washroom of a jail or a mental institution.
The third floor — the attic that Alma Mahler-Gropius had redesigned as a spacious studio, where Werfel had his desk and high desk, where the rough board walls were covered with large posters for his plays — has been divided up into four little mansard rooms for the use of shipyard employees. “In that room with its board walls,” Werfel noted in his diary in 1922, “I sense, time and again, my spirits welcoming me.” Many of his works were created here, in addition to Mirror Man: Goat Song (Bocksgesang), Paul Among the Jews (Paulus unter den Juden), Juarez and Maximilian (Juarez und Maximilian), The Pascarella Family (Die Geschwister von Neapel), and The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh). Chain-smoking, he wrote and wrote here, for twenty years, until the Anschluss — the annexation of Austria by the German Reich — deprived him of his workplace. Not a speck of dust, not a single vibration in the air is left to remind anyone of what took place here, who lived, suffered, and rejoiced here, only fifty or sixty years ago. There are NO SMOKING signs in big black letters above each of the doors to the mansard rooms.
A subdued babble of high-pitched voices rises from the ground floor: Barbara’s fairy-tale record. “Some days, all she does is read, that Barbara,” her mother tells me. “Last Christmas, she read the whole newspaper, even the stuff in parentheses. ”I find myself staring at a notice that is posted in every room of the house, even here, in the former attic:
Austrian Shipyards AG
Linz-Korneuburg, Korneuburg Yard
Shipyard Home — Breitenstein No. 102
Dear Vacation Guests!
A most cordial welcome to our vacation home. We wish you a wonderful stay.
Every year, funds permitting, we make improvements to render our guests’ stay more pleasant.
To guarantee order in the home, we have to ask that you obey the following house rules.
HOUSE RULES
Please observe the following mealtimes:
0800 breakfast and pickup of picnic lunches
1200 lunch
1830 dinner
Drinks served only during meals and in the evenings until 2130.
If you plan an extended excursion and hence a later return, please notify management in advance.
Afternoon rest period: 1330-1530.
During this time, please refrain from playing the radio, walk quietly on the stairs, and close doors quietly. In the immediate vicinity of the house, children are also required to play quietly.
The night rest period begins at 2200.
After this time, television sets must be turned down to a volume audible only within your room, so as not to disturb other guests.
Please wear slippers when in the house.
Use the electric-shaver outlets only for electric shavers.
Standing and sitting on the radiators is not permitted.
If your room is not fully occupied, please use only 1 bed.
Lying on the beds in day clothes is not permitted.
Furniture, bed linen, etc., have been newly acquired and should be treated with care.
As the walls in the mansard rooms are wood, smoking is not permitted in these rooms. There is no smoking in the dining room.
Trash must not be deposited on the surrounding paths or on the lawn or in the toilet bowl. It should be deposited in the containers provided.
Books and games should be treated with care and returned. Newspapers and journals are for common use. They must not be taken to rooms before the evening and should be returned to the rack in the morning.
Lawn chairs and outdoor games are to be returned after use.
The house manager is responsible for the enforcement of these house rules.
Requests and complaints should be addressed to the house manager.
Austrian Shipyards AG
Linz-Korneuburg, Korneuburg Yard
“I Am Goat Song”
Late fall 1919 saw the publication of The Last Judgment.[288] Franz Werfel had not felt close to this work for quite some time — it seemed to confirm him as a literary expressionist, and since he had been following his Catholic and conservative leanings more and more in the past months, he wanted to dissociate himself from that radical artistic stance. In the spring of 1920 he used a newspaper interview, on the occasion of the successful premiere of The Trojan Women at the Vienna Burgtheater, to declare himself “quite consciously opposed to dramatic expressionism.”[289] He attacked the movement as a North European fad that he, a man of the South, intended to combat from then on. “Our heart,” he went on to say, “more than ever belongs to the music of the vaulting arches, the stretti, the finali, the splendid breathtaking absurdities of the theater — in short, our heart belongs to the divine Verdi!”
Now that Mirror Man was finished, he was casting around for new material. Not the Murderer was selling steadily and had received some enthusiastic reviews. It also provided Werfel with the first substantial income of his life. The Trojan Women ran for many months in Vienna, yet Werfel felt depressed and impotent without an idea for a new work. He made an outline for a novel directed against Karl Kraus[290]: the latter’s desperate attempts to become assimilated are put in jeopardy by the unexpected appearance of an Orthodox Jewish relative; appalled, “Karl Kalans,” man of letters, decides to resolve the problem by simply poisoning his unwanted cousin.
Werfel spent most of the summer of 1920 in Vienna, until Alma sent him back to Breitenstein. She believed that he was capable of concentrated creative work only in the solitude of her house when she was not staying there. A few days after his thirtieth birthday he did indeed start working on an idea for a play with literary symbolism[291] that had preoccupied him for a while: what if his hydrocephalic son Martin Carl Johannes had survived and reached maturity? He wrapped the idea into a plot about Slovenian landowners at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a time when popular uprisings had been bloodily suppressed by the Turkish military. The protagonist of the play, half man, half Pan-like creature, would never appear onstage but would simply be reflected in the reactions of the other characters. This Werfelian Golem became a personification of revolution, a symbolic idol of the dispossessed, disenfranchised, and weak, spreading panic among the high and mighty.
Werfel called the project Goat Song[292], a direct translation of the Greek term tragoidia. In an arresting sequence of short scenes, far more accomplished in terms of both language and content than the Mirror Man experiment, he joined the private tragedy of his own son’s deformity to his former vehement political engagement in the cause of the proletariat. The character Juvan, for instance, the self-appointed leader of the disenfranchised, was a composite of anarchist Red Guards and Russian propagandists Werfel had met during those weeks of revolt in Vienna.
Werfel may have wanted to please Alma by deprecating his own enthusiasm on the barricades as an aberration of youth. Whi
le working on Goat Song, however, he realized that he still felt responsive to the demands of the dispossessed and oppressed of all nations. The socialist revolution was both glorified and damned in Werfel’s fascinating new play as it began to take shape. As Werfel himself put it later, the play symbolized “the theme of our time, the sense of destruction.”[293]
In October 1920 Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius were divorced in Weimar.[294] “There is one human being in this world,” Werfel thereupon wrote to his beloved from Prague, “to whom I say Yes more than I say it to God.” Every day, he said, he gave thanks on his knees for her being in the world: “I could just weep incessantly.” He wanted to take her to Venice to celebrate her divorce, and he even studied a little Italian during his stay in Prague.
At that time he was working on a “Dramaturgy and Explication for the Magical Play Mirror Man” (“Dramaturgie und Deutung des Zauberspiels Spiegelmensch”)[295], creating a kind of guide for his future audience through the turmoil of the Magical Trilogy and its characters. In the meantime, galley proofs of the play had been mailed to the most important German-language theaters in Europe. Kurt Wolff regarded the sarcastic song about Karl Kraus as a total failure and had tried to persuade his favorite author to delete it, but Werfel insisted on leaving the embarrassing monologue in the text. Mirror Man was bound to be a success, he wrote to the disgruntled publisher at the end of October, “simply because there is no drama in a polyphonic style these days, just a lot of barren verbiage!”[296]
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 12
